Tiresias – Carol Barnett

Composer: Carol Barnett Text by: Marisha Chamberlain Instrumentation: SATB, piano Duration: Approx. 5 minutes Date Written:  2020 Composer’s note: Tiresias, the most famous prophet of ancient Greek mythology, is featured in stories about the King of Thebes, Oedipus, and Odysseus. The complex figure of Tiresias can be seen as a celebration of the fluidity of life’s experiences. Tiresias spent portions of their life as a woman and portions as a man, portions seeing and blind, and were granted the gift of seven lifespans. Tiresias thus became a liminal figure--arbitrating the spaces between male and female, sightedness and non-sightedness, mortality and immortality, and human and divine. Their experiences gave them extraordinary depth of perception from all perspectives, and though Tiresias’ prophecies were often very brief and sometimes enigmatic, they were never wrong. As usual with prophetic figures, it was (and still is) up to the people consulting the prophet to figure out what was m